Upper Roxborough is the last rural corner of Philadelphia, a place where forests and fields reign. Squeezed by development and climate change, how much longer can it last?
John Carson’s little spread at the Manatawna Farm community garden sits off a gravel road along the Philadelphia–Montgomery County line, in a place that looks frozen in time. On a day this summer, when sunshine and storm clouds battle overhead, the 68-year-old takes shelter from both underneath a patio umbrella, reclining in an Adirondack chair. Bees and butterflies flit between black-eyed Susans he planted nearby.
On the other side of a fence, a hayfield is rejuvenating between harvests. In the fall, bobolinks, majestic grassland birds, will stop there during their annual return to South America. Beyond the hayfield there’s an old farmhouse and barn, then another hayfield, then a powerline right-of-way, then the Schuylkill River, and rising beyond that, a thickly wooded hillside in Montgomery County.
Bending his tan, slender figure to fidget with a rock, Carson marvels that the city of Philadelphia still contains such a view. Then he wonders how much time it has left…